ALCMAEON THE PHYSICIAN

(The following are two entries on the ancient physician and philosopher Alcmaeon of Croton.)

He is very little known, and some students of pre-Socratic thought find it possible to ignore him completely, as anybody now asking "Alcmaeon who?!," very well knows. But, as for me, not only am I refusing to ignore him in this section, but I am giving him two whole entries, which immediately elevates him to the status of a major pre-Socratic figure. Am I right in doing this? I am sure that I am.

Webster’s Biographical Dictionary describes him as a “Greek physician and Pythagorean philosopher.” He is also said to have been a direct pupil of Pythagoras, which is chronologically sustainable, but still this fact has not been established to anybody’s reasonable satisfaction. As a sort of agreeable compromise, we have included him in this section’s sequence of entries right after Pythagoras, but we are going to discuss him on his own merit, giving him two entries here. This one will consider him as a physician and medical scientist; the second one will look at him as a philosopher.

Alcmaeon’s incredible achievement as a physician must be put in the context of the chronological timeline. The commonly acknowledged “father of modern medicine” Hippocrates lived a full century after him. It is argued that all Hippocratic medicine including his teaching about the four types of temperament, was based on Alcmaeon’s ideas. It is very unfortunate that Alcmaeon has been so underrated and virtually unknown in modern historiography of medicine and philosophy of science. For this reason alone, we must take note of him here, and for this reason we are giving him more than one entry, thus treating him as a major figure of PreSocratica. Perhaps, his greatest medical, scientific, and philosophical achievement has been placing the source of human cognition in the brain, rather than in the heart, as was the common conception of his time. His other great achievement in this vein was to recognize certain mental similarities between humans and animals, the capacity of both to experience emotions, sensations, and perceptions. In other words, just like the humans, the animals possessed a soul.

It was, however, one thing for an animal to have a soul, but quite a different thing to proceed with equating its psychical organization with that of a human being. Man differs from the animal by virtue of his intellect and reasoning capacity. Anatomically, this boils down to major differences in the size and structure of the brain, and of the sensory organs. Now, although the intellect is what sets man apart from the animals, the intellect itself is rooted in perceptions, originating in the sensory organs. Alcmaeon sees perceptions as the starting point of all cognition, and attempts to describe the conditions under which perceptions arise, which require an adequate amount of homogeneity between the sensory organs and their stimulants. (Although in this first entry we are looking at Alcmaeon the physician, see how seamlessly anatomy/medicine turns into epistemology/philosophy here. In fact, I have deliberately allowed this anatomical discussion to turn into a philosophical discussion, in order to make this particular point.)

Returning to medical subjects, Alcmaeon was making a connection between different types of vital activity and blood circulation. A partial reflux of blood from the veins in the brain causes sleep, while the return of blood causes awakening and a full reflux causes death. The overall state of health depends on four elements which are water, earth, air, and fire: the building blocks of the body. An equilibrium and harmony of the four determines the physical health of the body and the soundness of the mind. Their imbalances cause diseases and ultimately death. Their balance depends on the type of food the person eats, on geography, climate, and the environment, as well as on the peculiarities of the individual organism. (How modern sounding!!!)

And finally, to close this entry, the following much abridged excerpt from the Alcmaeon entry in Wikipedia gives a competent and succinct overview of the rest of his accomplishments as the pre-Hippocratic genius of ancient medicine:

He was considered an early pioneer and advocate of anatomical dissection, the first to identify Eustachian tubes. His great discoveries in the field of dissection were noted in antiquity, but whether his knowledge in this branch of science was derived from the dissection of animals or of human bodies is still disputed.

He also was the first to dwell on the internal causes of illnesses. He first suggested that health was a state of equilibrium between opposing humors, and that illnesses occurred because of problems in the environment, nutrition and lifestyle. He also experimented with live animals by cutting the nerve behind the eye, to study vision.

Our discussion of Alcmaeon continues in the next entry.